Interview with Boris Renski at Mirantis

TechCenter

DellTechCenter.com is a community for IT professionals that focuses on Data Center and End User Computing best practices. Here you can learn about and share knowledge about Dell products and solutions.

Interview with Boris Renski at Mirantis

Dell: Can you tell us something about Mirantis?Boris Renski:Mirantis is largest OpenStack systems integrator in the ecosystem today. We have roughly 370 people in the company of which about 320 are engineers. We've been doing OpenStack pretty much since its conception in 2010.

Our belief is that in the early days, most of the OpenStack economy is driven purely by services. We've bet on becoming the services company for OpenStack and we've gained a bit of success in that area. The majority of organizations today that have done something production bound with OpenStack have interfaced with us in some shape or form. And now as OpenStack is evolving and pure services is becoming more and more commoditized, we started to add some other components to our business.

We launched a training program last year, and we do public courses every month. And for every public course we do, we also conduct anywhere between five and ten private courses.

Recently, we've also launched something called FUEL, which is an automation library for building OpenStack in a do-it-yourself type manner. We basically absorbed all the experience of our services team and packaged it in a way that third parties can consume. And we've open-sourced it entirely, it’s available on our website for download. We primarily use it as a differentiation for our services at this point and we also sell support for FUEL.

Q: You are working very closely with Dell. Tell us about that.A: Dell is a great partner of ours. They're actually also an investor in Mirantis. Throughout the whole history of OpenStack ecosystem evolution, Dell's been extremely prominent in advocating OpenStack unlike many other infrastructure giants out there. And through that kind of virtue of close affiliation with OpenStack, Dell has really become one of the platforms of choice for hardware and solutions around OpenStack. We are a vendor to Dell, we provide services to Dell and we also do quite a bit of joint customer engagements. And we see this business continuing to grow going forward.